Negotiating Parental Leave Policies in Britain and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With ‘birth bonding’ and breastfeeding among its tools, and its explicit naming of mothers as primary caregivers (Sears and Sears, 2001, p. 5), AP presupposes and reinforces women's biological responsibility for the work of childrearing. Like much contemporary parenting discourse (Lee, 2018), AP assumes cis women as the only possible and appropriate parents and idealizes a biological relationship between mother and child, reinforced by parenting practices that ostensibly work to strengthen such a relationship. Despite its name suggesting it may be equally available to fathers, AP particularly identifies mothers’ bodies as a site through which ‘good’ parenting may be enacted. These gendered beliefs about appropriate caregivers (evident in the ideology of intensive mothering that informs contemporary parenting philosophies) shape and, in turn are shaped by, policies and legislation that govern the experience of childrearing. Perhaps the most prominent among these policies is parental leave. Parental leave has attracted a great deal of public and scholarly attention, with feminist scholars in particular delineating the gendered patterns in leave taking and criticizing the gendered logic in legislation in order to devise new, gender-equitable approaches (Doucet, 2009; Macdonald, 2009). These gendered patterns cannot be challenged solely through legislative changes. The persistence of these patterns is linked to the dominant ideology of mothering (Macdonald, 2009) that requires mothers to take the greatest responsibility for their children's wellbeing and is embraced by mothers and policy makers alike. AP represents one significant embodiment of this ideology. In its emphasis on breastfeeding, babywearing and other parenting techniques that centre the maternal body, AP aligns with the underlying message of parental leave legislation that stresses the importance of the early years of an infant's life and mothers as uniquely suited to perform care during this period. However, as the chapters in Part II demonstrate, the black mothers interviewed for this study negotiated and deployed AP in ways that both affirmed and undermined these ideals of good mothering. These mothers’ management of parental leave is similarly complex, revealing the raced and classed dimensions of parental leave legislation, and through their narrative negotiations with leave and AP, convey a uniquely intersectional experience of motherhood. This chapter discusses the divisions of parenting labour shaped by parental leave policies and adherence to (or rejection of) AP.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".